[The following was written by my anonymous academic in response to a posting at a blog called "Human Rights Archaeology" (who knew?).]

A blog called Human Rights Archaeology has attempted to deconstruct an old post on Nadia Abu El Haj’s highly politicized critiques of Israeli archaeology.

Here is the original post at Solomonia.

And here, the rather long-winded critique.

I stand behind my original assessment of Abu El Haj’s work on Roman Jerusalem.

Abu El Haj does not say that it is merely possible that the fire that destroyed the Burnt House could have been caused by "accidental fires" or by Jewish "Zealots" rather than by the Roman Army. She asserts that the idea that the house was burnt by Zealots in a kind of class warfare, or that it burnt accidentally are "equally (as) plausible" as the understanding that the house was burnt by the Roman Army.

But these three possibilities are far from being "equally plausible."

Stone houses rarely burn with thick destruction layers because householders and servants usually put out accidental fires in stone houses before they get out of control. This is one of the great advantages of living in stone buildings without the lavish supplies of flammable textiles, plastics, upholstered furniture, carpets and draperies that make our homes comfortable.

The Zealots are reported by Josephus to have burnt some houses. The Romans burnt the entire city at extremely high temperatures, temperatures that we know could only have been achieved by piling large bundles of fuel in the stone city. The fire was so hot that in parts of the city it turned the Jerusalem stone into powder. Every house in the city was destroyed.

This is why every archaeologist working on the period assumes that it is highly probably that the Burnt House was destroyed when the Roman Army burnt the entire city.

Of course it is "possible" that one of the only two houses that survived to be uncovered happened to have been one of the few houses burnt by Zealots, but it is a remote possibility.

The criticism I and others have of Abu El Haj is the absurdity of her assertion that "there are several alternative but equally plausible accounts" of the burning of that house. No alternative account is "equally plausible" with the assumption that the Romans did it.

A few pages later she makes that equally absurd claim that Jerusalem in the time of Jesus was not Jewish. "[F]or most of its history, including the Herodian period, Jerusalem was not a Jewish city, but rather one integrated into larger empires and inhabited, primarily, by 'other' communities." pp 175-6

On these two points she is simply wrong. Herodian Jerusalem was Jewish, with small ex-pat and foreign communities. It is not "equally plausible" that Zealots or an accident destroyed the Burnt House.

On these two points as, indeed, in the book as a whole, Abu El Haj writes not as a scholar but merely as a propagandist.